Slowly, Louisiana moving toward prison reform: Stephanie Grace

It often seems as if the political universe can be divided neatly into two camps: People who focus on policies' human costs and those who fixate on their financial costs. Sure, the two groups aren't mutually exclusive. But think about how many public figures and interest groups fall into one category or the other. Now try to envision what would happen if they found themselves on the same side of a problem.

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That's what happened in, of all places, tough-talking Texas, and on of all subjects, prison reform. Texas's Democratic Party may have gone the way of, well, Louisiana's. But even with a law-and-order GOP majority, the state reduced its prison population by nearly 10 percent during a period when Louisiana's soared by almost a third. Texas closed a prison, even as Louisiana created incentives for local lock-ups to fill their beds with state prisoners, according to The Times-Picayune's recent series "Louisiana Incarcerated."

And very slowly and not at all surely, there are signs it could happen in Louisiana. Despite Texas-style politics in which throwing away the key is often the default stance, Louisiana leaders are also starting to recognize that the policies that made it the world's prison capital are costly, ineffectual and unmerciful. The tide is finally starting to turn in favor of allowing reformed lifers a second chance and paying more attention to lesser offenders who often end up warehoused and even traded like chattel among the rural sheriffs.

The journey of House Bill 543 shows just how incremental and precarious progress is. The bill, authored by Democratic state Rep. Patricia Smith of Baton Rouge, wouldn't make a huge dent in the prison population, but it would make some nonviolent, non-sex offenders serving life sentences eligible for parole.

Yet it nearly died this week after being voted down in the Senate, only to be revived a day later at the urging of Metairie Republican Danny Martiny, who issued a succinct plea for practicality, perspective and mercy. Lurking in the debate's background was a much bigger GOP name, Gov. Bobby Jindal, who'd indicated he'd sign the measure.

"I am not here to condone that or say let them all out of jail," Martiny said. "But give them some light at the end of the tunnel. This is not parole, this is parole consideration....The cost of incarceration is killing us."

In order to convert Monday's narrow loss into Tuesday's 23-12 win, Martiny assured his colleagues that the "vast majority" of inmates who'd be affected are drug offenders and people convicted under a now-defunct three-strikes law. Even then, the coalition remained ideologically lopsided, with New Orleans Democrats such as Karen Carter Peterson, J.P. Morrell and Ed Murray joining Martiny in support and suburban Republicans like Senate president and recent GOP convert John Alario, Jack Donahue and Conrad Appel opposing.

Still, Jindal's backing, at a time when he's jockeying for national position in a party that often punishes detours from conservative orthodoxy, signals that the issue isn't as radioactive as it once was. So do his efforts to revive the state Sentencing Commission, whose recommendations include several reforms that he's already signed into law (Jindal's progressivism only goes far; he's also accepted far fewer parole recommendations than Kathleen Blanco did).

Of course, political debate isn't just driven by competing costs. The benefits count too, particularly when protected by a strong lobby. The current system creates lots of losers -- lifers who've turned their lives around but have no hope of release, inmates serving lighter sentences in rural parish prisons who get little help with reentry, the communities that remain crime-ridden and the Louisiana taxpayers, But there are also powerful winners, mainly privatized prison companies and the sheriffs who get to provide jobs and use the per-inmate allocation to fund their non-prison operations.

No matter how many people agree on a solution, the prison industrial complex won't be easy to deconstruct, and until that happens, there's little prospect of Texas-scale reform. As Kevin Kane, president of the libertarian think tank Pelican Institute put it recently, misguided policies have just made it too lucrative to keep locking 'em up, even as it has done little to make the streets safer.